Archive for the ‘Firebird III’ tag

Harley Earl poses with the Firebird concepts in 1958. All photos courtesy General Motors.

In the car-obsessed 1950s, showing off technical capability was just as important to automakers as staying current with the latest design trends. While auto shows served as a platform to highlight cars that would be hitting dealerships in the near future, technology-driven events like the World’s Fair and GM’s Motorama served to highlight features that would (presumably) be appearing in cars of the future. GM’s trio of aircraft-inspired Firebird concepts were never intended to be production automobiles, but they did give audiences of the 1950s hope for a brighter motoring future.

Designed under the guidance of the legendary Harley Earl, the official purpose of all three Firebird models was to test the feasibility of the gas turbine engine in automotive applications. Each also pushed the envelope of technology, and by the time the Firebird III was introduced in 1958, General Motors had done a remarkably good job of predicting what the future of the automobile would look like (styling trends excepted). The very first Firebird model carried the internal designation of XP-21, and it was constructed under Shop Order (S.O.) 1921. As related in David W. Temple’s book GM’s Motorama – The Glamorous Show Cars of a Cultural Phenomenon, Harley Earl drew his inspiration for the original Firebird from the Douglas F4D Skyray, a fighter interceptor aircraft that Earl had seen in an inflight magazine. When seen from above, this inspiration is unmistakeable, and the concept’s fiberglass fuselage conveys a jet-age sense of speed and power.

The Firebird I, clearly showing its aircraft influence.

Completed in 1953, in time for the January 1954 Motorama at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the Firebird I holds the distinction of being the first gas turbine car unveiled in the United States (Chrysler’s first turbine-powered car debuted to the public a couple months later, in March 1954). Power came from a GM-designed GT-302 Whirlfire Turbo-Power gas turbine engine, which utilized a two-stage design incorporating both a gasifier section and a power section. Unlike a jet airplane, which uses thrust for propulsion, the Firebird concepts relied upon this thrust to drive a power turbine, which in turn was linked to a transmission that powered the driven rear wheels. Output was rated at an impressive 370 horsepower, once the gasifier turbine spooled to 26,000 RPM and the power turbine was spinning at a more relaxed 13,000 RPM. Like a conventional piston engine, idle speed of the GT-302 engine was considerably lower, but in this case that’s a relative term, as the gasifier turbine still spun at 8,000 RPM.

From the beginning, the Firebird I was all about performance, and early estimates put the car’s theoretical top speed at somewhere above 200 MPH. Plans were made for the car to be tested at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway by noted racing driver Mauri Rose, but before this could happen, Charles McCuen, then a vice president in charge of GM’s Research Laboratories, crashed the prototype at the Milford Proving Ground. Unfamiliar with the acceleration of gas-turbine vehicles (and their lack of engine braking), McCuen found himself unable to slow for a corner, and the low-slung Firebird concept passed beneath the safety barrier on the outside of the banked turn. The executive was seriously injured in the crash, though he would later recover and return to GM. A new body was produced for the Firebird, which was eventually repaired for testing by Rose. Shaken by the car’s first crash (and likely out of additional spare parts), GM mandated that there would be no high-speed testing, a fact which surely frustrated Rose.

The Firebird I.

As with any pioneering idea, the Firebird I had its share of problems. Its output proved to be too much for the two-speed transmission, and project leader Emmett Conklin reportedly experienced wheelspin when shifting into second gear (an attention-getting prospect at 100 MPH). The car was particularly noisy, guzzled fuel, and produced exhaust temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As a testbed for GM’s gas turbine engine technology, however, the Firebird accomplished its mission in proving that such an engine could be adapted for automotive use; optimization was another matter entirely.

In 1956, GM introduced its second Firebird concept car, known internally as the XP-43 and constructed under S.O. 2683. Unlike the performance-oriented original, the Firebird II was built to demonstrate what the family car of the future might look like, assuming, of course, it relied on a gas turbine engine for propulsion. Now adapted for four passengers with an oversize bubble roof, the Firebird II looked more like an automobile than a fighter aircraft, but the high-tech features envisioned by GM were straight out of the space age.

The Firebird II was 1958’s vision of future family transportation.

Designed for “the highway of the future,” the Firebird II featured sensors that allowed it to follow an electric wire embedded in the roadway, overseen by a network of Autoway attendants. Though that particular future didn’t evolve quite the way GM had envisioned, the Firebird II did show off a remarkable amount of technology, including a self-leveling air/oil suspension; “anti-skid” brakes; disc brakes with a floating rotor design; a rear-facing camera system for improved visibility; a luggage platform that rose from the trunk, simplifying the loading and unloading process and a titanium skin (on the display car only) that offered the strength of steel with the weight of aluminum. Its most innovative feature, however, was a regenerative system that cooled the exhaust to reduce danger while pre-heating air entering the compressor for improved fuel economy. The ingenious system quieted the car as well, and contemporary reports claimed that the car’s GT-304 Whirlfire engine (reduced in output to a more manageable 200 horsepower) was now nearly as quiet and nearly as fuel efficient as a conventional piston engine.

The Firebird II.

The final Firebird model would be the Firebird III, constructed in 1958 as XP-73 under S.O. 90238. If the original Firebird was about performance and the second Firebird was about practicality, the final Firebird was Harley Earl’s best effort to bring these two worlds together. Perhaps the most conventionally styled Firebird of all (except, perhaps, for its seven fins designed to add stability), the final version of the series boasted a twin bubble cockpit design that was “flown” on the road via a “Unicontrol” joystick instead of conventional controls. Accelerating required the driver to push the stick forward, braking required it to be moved to the rear, and a change in direction was accomplished by moving the stick to the left or to the right. The Firebird III earns the distinction of being the first electronically controlled car, and it also relied on primitive computer systems to temper driver input to avoid a loss of control.

Power came from a further evolved gas turbine engine, and its GT-305 Whirlfire engine now produced a balanced 225 horsepower. The engine was also 25 percent lighter than its predecessors, while producing a further 25 percent improvement in fuel economy. To power systems unrelated to propulsion like power steering, brake pumps, wing-mounted air brakes (a feature common to all Firebird models), the self-leveling air/oil suspension and the air conditioning compressor, the Firebird III utilized a separate gasoline-powered 10hp twin-cylinder engine, designed for fuel-efficiency.

Like the Firebird II, the Firebird III featured sensors for Autoguide routing and Cruisecontrol that allowed for autonomous operation. First shown at the 1958 Motorama, GM dusted off the Firebird III for exhibition at its final Motorama event in 1961. Today, all three cars are part of the collection at the GM Heritage Center, and they’re occasionally displayed at car shows and concours d’elegance events from coast to coast.

Though the future didn’t happen quite as GM’s engineers imagined, today the role of the Autoway attendant is in part filled by OnStar. Anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control are now mandated in new cars, and fly-by-wire throttles have long replaced mechanical connections between accelerator and throttle. Global Positioning Systems allow drivers to route themselves from point to point via a choice of roads, and even display roadside necessities in advance of each and every exit. Communication for the car isn’t a challenge these days, either, as virtually everyone of kindergarten age and above owns a cell phone, the bulk of which can be paired with modern automobiles via Bluetooth.

Gas turbine engines never saw production, and GM’s Firebird concepts didn’t get all the details of the future correct, but it’s hard not to be impressed with the amount of features the concepts did predict, decades before they became commonplace.

For my third – and probably final – installment of Pitching the Prototypes, I’ve taken on probably the greatest concept cars of all time, GM’s three Firebirds of the 1950s. These turbine-powered, titanium-skinned, radar-guided concepts were the ultimate idea of what the utopian future of transportation would be like.

The great thing about the Firebirds is that they look futuristic and outlandish even today, so they can fit relatively easily into many different advertising styles. I made four ads, one for each individual vehicle and one for all three as if Firebird were a new General Motors brand.

For the Firebird I, above, I did not really look to any existing or contemporary ads for inspiration. The car looks so much like a jet fighter that it was easy to design an ad with a modern, simplistic design.

For the Firebird II, I tried to more accurately follow an era-correct advertising style. In this case I modeled the ad after early 1960s Corvette magazine ads, something like this one, placing the car itself more on the top of the page with a large paragraph of text below it.

With the Firebird III, probably the wildest looking of the three concepts, I got a bit stuck. I couldn’t quite get the car to work right with a number of different styles, so in the end I made the Firebird III ad in an exaggerated, almost stereotypical, 1950s-60s style. I made it overly exuberant and whimsical with bright colors, a cartoony font and a cheesy catch phrase.

Finally, I designed the advertisement for the entire Firebird line in the style of modern Cadillac ads. If it weren’t for the vintage look of the photo, the crisp lines and font of the ad could actually make it seem as if the futuristic Firebirds were on sale today.

What would you think if GM started a new, turbine-powered Firebird brand? If they did, how do you think the cars should be advertised?

Once was a time when budding automotive designers assembled vast collections of brochures and other car photos, cut them up and gave the cars their own individual touches. Photoshop and other digital photo manipulation tools have made the process much less labor intensive, but the creativity’s still there, as we see from the photochops we’ve been digging on HarborIndiana’s Flickr stream. Not as wild as the retro-Sovietpunk renderings by 600V – in fact, far more subtle in some cases, and more often than not involving town car conversions on latter-day luxury four-doors – they’re still total flights of fancy that would take plenty of work to pull off in real life. For example, the sliced and diced Imperial above, cut down and turned into a two-seater, but with far less stubby proportions than Murray Pfaff’s Imperial Speedster.

Here’s what we mean by subtle – a four-door Continental Mark II. Could FoMoCo have built it? Probably? Should FoMoCo have built it? Up for debate. Did FoMoCo build it? Nope.

If something doesn’t quite look right with this Eldorado, and you can’t quite put your finger on it, then HarborIndiana’s done a good job. Answer: He shrank it down to roughly the proportions of a Camaro, with the Camaro’s long-hood, short-deck profile.

Another Monday, another batch of very cool old press photos from David Greenlees. Where last week’s photos followed a streamlining theme, this week’s photos depict very early alternative-fuel concept vehicles from GM. First, above, a photo from May 7, 1969, depicting a bunch of techs installing a four-cylinder engine into a 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix. Yes, four-cylinder. The caption on the back elaborates:

General Motors researchers install the combustion system-steam generator in the first modern steam car developed by the automobile industry. The experimental vehicle – called the GM SE-101 – is a modified 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix. Already mounted in the engine compartment is the 160 horsepower, 4-cylinder expander. The SE-101 is one of two steam-powered vehicles shown to the press at the GM Progress of Power show and was developed by GM Research Laboratories to permit evaluation of the vapor cycle engine under actual operating conditions.

From other resources, we see that this was allegedly the first steam-powered vehicle with a complete set of power accessories, including air conditioning, thus making it more feasible for modern vehicles. We also see that the steam engine could run on any atomized fuel, making it a multi-fuel engine capable of running on diesel, kerosene or gasoline, and that it was backed up by the experimental 250-TT toric transmission. What prevented further development of the SE-101 were the size and weight of the steam powerplant (450 pounds heavier than the V-8 engine it replaced at less than half the horsepower), less-than-ideal water consumption from a too-small water condenser, and the likelihood of freezing.

As for the other steam-powered vehicle presented with the SE-101, we believe that was the SE-124 1969 Chevelle, fitted with a Besler Developments steam engine. Both were profiled in the July 1969 issue of Popular Science by frequent SIA contributors Norbye and Dunne.

The other photo shows an uncommon view of the Firebird III as it received its 225hp Whirlfire Gas Turbine engine. The photo dates to September 14, 1958, and also shows a rare glimpse of the interior structure of the Firebird III before its titanium body panels were attached.